Christie’s to Return Cambodian Statue

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By TOM MASHBERG and RALPH BLUMENTHAL

MAY 6, 2014

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Christie’s will return this 10th-century sandstone sculpture to Cambodia. Credit Christie's

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Yet another ancient statue looted in the 1970s from a single remote temple in the jungles of Cambodia has turned up in the United States, this time at Christie’s, which is voluntarily paying to return it to its homeland.

Christie’s sold the statue, a 10th-century sandstone depiction of a mythological figure known as Pandava, to an anonymous collector in 2009, but bought it back earlier this year after officials determined that the sculpture had been looted.

In just the past three years, Cambodian officials say they have traced seven statues in the United States to the same Khmer temple, called Prasat Chen, about 75 miles northeast of Angkor Wat, a site pillaged during the upheaval of that country’s civil war. The Metropolitan Museum of Art voluntarily returned two of them last year and Sotheby’s, after a lengthy court battle that ended in a settlement, has agreed to return a third.

On Tuesday, after reviewing a Cambodian claim for more than a year, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., said it too would return a huge statue that Cambodian officials have said was stolen from the same temple.

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The statue of Bhima that the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., agreed on Tuesday to return to Cambodia. Credit Norton Simon Art Foundation

“The dam has broken,” Helen Ibbitson Jessup, an expert on Khmer sculpture who is helping Cambodia recover the statues, said of the returns, now totaling five items. “One assumes they were looted at the same moment, then widely distributed,” she added.

Cambodian experts say that two other American museums, the Denver Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art, have statues from the temple, but officials at those museums say they have received no evidence that their works were illicitly taken.

The two latest returns coincide with a ceremony on Wednesday at which federal officials in New York will return a statue to Cambodia that Sotheby’s had hoped to sell for $3 million in 2011. Sotheby’s pulled the item from sale, and, in late 2012, the United States Attorney’s Office in Manhattan sued the auction house on Cambodia’s behalf, contending that it had trafficked in stolen property. In a settlement reached last December, the auction house agreed to surrender the statue and the federal government said it found no fault with the auction house’s conduct.

The Christie’s statue depicts a character that antiquities experts say sat on a pedestal only a few feet from the Sotheby’s statue, a far larger sculpture representing a mythic Hindu warrior known as Duryodhana. Both were part of a unique grouping of 10th-century sandstone works created at the height of the Koh Ker dynastic period, known for its huge yet sophisticated statuary.

The Norton Simon work, known as Bhima, stood in a fighting posture against Duryodhana in the original grouping, which consisted of nine characters from the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. It had been in the museum’s collection, identified as a “temple wrestler,” since 1976 when it had been purchased from the New York dealer William H. Wolff, the museum said.

The museum has previously said that Cambodian representatives had seen the statue on display in California and had not raised any objections. In a statement on Tuesday the Norton Simon said it continues to have “a good-faith disagreement” with Cambodia over ownership of the Bhima, but after sending representatives to Phnom Penh in March to meet with government officials, it has “worked directly with Cambodia to come up with a mutually acceptable solution,” and agreed to give it back as a gift.

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Christie’s declined to discuss how it had determined the sculpture it sold had originally been looted. It had auctioned the Pandava statue twice, once in 2000 and again in 2009 for $146,500. It declined to identify the name of the second buyer, but said it contacted that person after reviewing the sale and determining that the statue was stolen. “The purchaser was cooperative, concerned about these issues and ultimately is pleased with the outcome,” Erin McAndrew, a Christie’s spokeswoman, said.

Martin Wilson, co-head of legal for Christie’s International, said that repatriation issues can be difficult but added, “Christie’s believes it has a useful role to play in facilitating the resolution of cultural property issues between source countries and collectors in specific circumstances.”

Chan Tani, Cambodia’s secretary of state, praised Christie’s for “a very generous approach” to the case. He said that the auction house had contacted him in December and then worked out a complex and costly deal with the owner to recover the object and pay for its return.

Sotheby’s is prepared to pay for the return of its statue as well, according to Andrew P. Gully, Sotheby’s worldwide director of communications. “We have provided information about several professional moving companies familiar with transporting antiquities,” he said in a statement, “and have offered to pay reasonable and documented costs of the transfer to Cambodia.”

Ms. Jessup credited the Metropolitan Museum for starting the trend by returning its two statues, called the Kneeling Attendants. Those colossal statues, obtained in the 1980s, flanked the entry to the museum’s Southeast Asian exhibition hall. She said that, with the Met’s decision, “a moral precedent was established and the tide of opinion clearly flowed towards restitution.”

Mr. Chan Tani said that recovering all the statues from the Prasat Chen temple is a national priority. The goal is to reattach the statues to their pedestals, which were left behind by the looters, and place them all together in a special display area in the national museum.

Anne LeMaistre, the Unesco representative in Phnom Penh who is involved in the Koh Ker recovery efforts, said: “It just demonstrates that the looting which took place at Koh Ker was an organized one and that all pieces were stolen by the same group and following the same patterns of clandestine excavations, illicit export and sale over time. By chance for the looters, the site of Koh Ker owned an extraordinary concentration of exceptional sculptures absolutely untouched because of its remote and inaccessible location.”

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